Overview of Human Resource Management
Discuss about the Current Issues in Law and Human Resource Management.
Human resource management, often abbreviated as HRM, is a term used to describe the formal systems that are being devised for the management of individuals within the organizations. The core responsibilities of the human resource manager fall into three major segments that are employee benefits and compensation, designing or defining work and staffing. The purpose of the human resource manager is essentially to maximize the overall productivity of the organizations through optimizing the efficiency of the employees, depending on the increasing changes in the world of business. The growth of companies increasingly depends upon the human resource practices in releasing their full potential of the human resources (Ashleigh, Higgs and Dulewicz 2012). Effective human resource practices helps in organizing the individual measures systematically, which further influence the attitude as well as behavior of the employees. This is done in a way that ensures the business achieve its growth and expansion.
The purpose of this report is to list and appraise the specific human resource practices, which highly contributes to the growth and success of the organizations or companies. Every organization, be it small or large, needs to hire a human resource manager in order to maintain a healthy work environment. The report throws light on the specific human resource practices like job security, selective hiring, decentralization and self managed teams, compensation policy, extensive training and information sharing. It is highly necessary that each and every manager has some role that is completely related to the human resource management (Brewster, Chung and Sparrow 2016). For instance, majority of the managers of an organization have to deal with certain factors like employee motivation, employee retention, employee compensation or benefits and others.
The human resource practices are actually expected to influence the overall nature of relationships as well as the character of helping with the organizations. The human resource managers as per Cartwright and Cooper (2014) assist by motivating or encouraging the employees and enhance their commitment as well as greater evolvement for quality improvement. Effective and efficient human resource management within the organizations helps in giving the employees to contribute productively to the overall company’s direction. It assists the businesses to conserve the overall costs by increasing information technological advances and this, in turn assists in the procedure of quality control. Cascio (2018) mentioned that effective management of these resources help in contributing to the sustainable competitive advantage of the companies.
Key Responsibilities of Human Resource Managers
The human resource are highly responsible for ensuring other employees of the organization comply with the security policies which are designed to protect the firm, clients on say, workforce of the company. The human resource representatives should make the employees aware of the company’s policies as well as procedures. Moreover, the human resource professionals need to work with the organizational management, in order to address as well as investigate any instances that involved violations of the company rules. The human resource professional of a company is highly responsible for providing the employees with a balance between their professional and personal life. As per Hendry (2012), the role of the human resource manager is to uphold the security policies of the company and it begins right from the staff recruitment procedure. Legally, human resource professionals can conduct background checks on several prospective hiring procedures, as long as they gain consent from those applicants. In addition to this, the pre-employment check-ups also include investigations regarding the employees’ criminal record all credit reports.
A company can lose money if the employees share the proprietary information with the company’s competitors, in a very casual manner. Moreover, according to Karim, Huda, and Khan (2012), human resource managers can face lawsuits if the employees fail to protect the client’s financial information. In order to avoid such issues, the human resource manager of the company should implement a code of conduct. This document of the human resource manager should include crystal clear instructions or guidelines for safeguarding the sensitive information of the companies. It is highly important to provide each and every employee with a copy of these policies and procedures. In addition to this, the employees should sign the agreement and abide by the companies terms and conditions. Over the time, the human resource professionals are also responsible for amend or updating these documents in order to accommodate the implementation of those new procedures or processes. The human resource representatives are highly responsible for ensuring that the staff members are aware of the changes within the organization. Thus, the human resource professionals are heavily responsible for the job security of the employees, and the employees are heavily reliant on them. For example; companies like QuickTrip, Southwest Airlines, Publix Infosys and others offer its employees with great job security.
The employee selection or recruitment procedure is an important part responsibility of the human resource managers. It is not done without proper planning or strategic implementation. According to Banfield, Kay and Royles (2018), the recruitment is defined as a procedure that helps the organizations to select from a wide pool of qualified job candidates. Before the companies recruit, it is important for them to implement proper plans for staffing or forecasting, in order to determine how many people the enterprises may require. This falls under the responsibility of the human resource professional of any company. Most importantly, it takes huge strategic planning for recruiting new staff members for any company. Developing the plans of hiring or selecting any candidate is the responsibility of the human resource managers. It is important for them to understand the condition of the labor market and also the relevant aspects of the labor market, as this is the key strategy of recruiting or hiring staff members. Based on the above information, it can be said that, the human resource managers must be always filling in for the position of recruiters, at the time when job opening takes place, at any company.
Human Resource Practices for Organizational Growth
In the words of Nieves and Quintana (2018), the first step in the recruitment procedure is analyzing the job opening, at any company. At this particular time, the resource managers should carefully look at the job descriptions, job positions for the job opening. The job analysis and job descriptions must be done by human resource managers of the companies. The basic human resource practices also include the analysis of job description or job position of the candidates. For such practices, the human resource managers may utilize innovative information technologies or other digital India platforms, in order to communicate with the newly hired employees. The human resource department is therefore, responsible for posting job vacancies on the social media sites, conducting preliminary interviews and also coordinating the pre-employment processes that include background investigations, reference checks and drug testing. In the small businesses, these particular fields are being filled by the human resource generalists, who also have expertise in every discipline of human resource practices. For example; Southwest Airlines receives around 342, 660 resumes but hires only around 7,200 employees.
Self managed teams have been growing rapidly and gained immense popularity in the recent years. In the words of Certo (2018), more than eighty percent of the companies have been using the self managed teams within their organizational structures. The companies also favor self managed teams in order to increase the productivity level and safe costs. If the practices of the self managed or decentralized teams are implemented in an effective manner, it has the potential of taking the organizations to a higher level. However, the self managed teams are not the right fit for every organization. The best performing teams are actually found in the companies, where the culture of the organizations clearly supports employees’ decision making procedure. Leading a self managed or decentralized team can be a tough job. Even though the teams are autonomous in terms of management and the way they carry out their activities, they still require some guidance from their team leaders, within the hierarch of the organizations. The teams at times, struggle in making decisions and require guidance from their supervisors.
Forces of the international competition as well as innovations within the companies have led to the overall development of the employee involvement programs. This also includes the decentralized or self managed teams. The widespread utilization of those programs poses some significant problems for the human resource management of the companies. The human resource professionals play a major role in outlining the overall job descriptions of the employees in order to increase the efficiency of the self managed work teams. The human resource professionals are required to guide the self managed teams, by providing them with regular trainings and inductions, which will assist them in understanding the goals and objectives of the companies. Moreover, assisting them will enable enhancement in the production level as well as increase their work efficiency as per Petrick (2017). Therefore, it can be said that the human resource managers play an immensely important role in guiding the decentralized or self managed teams, by reminding them their organizational roles and the objectives or goals. A good example of this is Google.
Job Security and Recruitment
The compensation of the employees is their fundamental component and is considered to be one of the critical activities of the human resource managers. However, the compensation policies generally refer to the wage of the employees, including the base salary, incentive or bonus plans, non-cash compensation or benefits. The organizations need to communicate as well as establish clear principles through which the employees must be paid. It is important for the companies to ensure that their benefit plans adhere to the legislation of employment (Bamberger, Meshoulam and Biron 2014). The elements of the compensation policies, which are being regulated by the provincial employment standard acts comprise minimum wage, overtime pay, rate of holiday rate, equal pay, how the payments are being made, how often the employees receive their wages, pay sheet, gratuities, deductions, pay roll records and lastly, vacation pay. These are the specific areas that fall under the responsibility of the human resource managers. Moreover, several companies have adopted the compensation principles, which ensure equity and fairness in the salary and pay rates administration. There should be transparency in the compensation practices, which should be strictly maintained by the human resource professionals (Jackson, Schuler and Jiang 2014).
An effective and efficient compensation policy is completely based upon the objectives and updated job descriptions, performance management as well as relevant administration of the salary. The salary administration typically encompasses in establishing the salary ranges, time frames of salary review and decision making criteria for increasing the salary. The human resource managers of the organizations should determine where they need to pay the specific job categories, which should be in relation with the employment market (Taylor, Doherty and Mc Graw 2015). The employment market generally includes both regional and industrial compensation norms. On the basis of the availabilities of qualified employees, the funds available for the wages and the ability of offering non-monetary attractors, the human resource professionals need to establish their policies. The non monetary attractors typically include vacations, indirect benefits and alternative arrangements of work (Shields et al. 2015). For this purpose, the human resource managers can also adopt the market comparison as an immensely important tool for making these decisions of policy making. For example; Starbucks Company provides great compensation and benefit packages to its employees in order to motivate and encourage them on the long run.
From the perspective of human resource management, developing talent is considered to be the best method of staffing the roles of the company. There are several ways or types of training, which a human resource manager can utilize to engage the employees for the development of the organizations. These types of the training procedure involve orientation, mentorship, in-house or external trainings. The training methods that are utilize depends upon the amount of internal resources available for the company’s training needs (Brewster 2017). Moreover, the company needs to place its training process on top of their priority list. Companies need to spend a significant amount for the training needs of the employees as well as their staff members. This includes everyone, from the staff members and the employees to the organizational managers. The company may also require conducting technical trainings, depending upon the job type and position. Technical trainings are the type of training that helps in reaching out the new employees in terms of technological aspects (Armstrong and Taylor 2014). For example; Seattle Genetics provides technical trainings, tuition reimbursement, online training courses and accessibility to job-related seminars and conferences to its employees.
Self-Managed Teams and Employee Involvement Programs
In addition to this, skills training are also a major type of training, which include the proficiencies that are needed to actually perform the job roles. For instance, an administrative assistance can be trained on how to answer the phone calls; on the contrary a salesperson can be trained on the assessment of the consumers’ needs and preferences. All these practices, fall under the responsibility of the human resource manager as these are internal trainings of an organization (Marchington et al. 2016). The human resource professionals can also hire professional experts or certified trainers in order to carry out these training sessions, after consulting with the higher authorities. Moreover, in some jobs, the professional trainings are must and the human resource managers are responsible to conduct orientation programs on an ongoing basis. The professional trainings are the type of training that are required to be updated and based on the individual’s own professional field (Gatewood, Feild and Barrick 2015). These are the major practices, which the human resource managers need to conduct in order to maintain the organizational culture as well as sustain development within the workplace.
Information sharing can be a major challenge faced by the human resource professionals as there are many policies, guidelines or rules within the organization. However, it is essential that the employees feel empowered to share their coherence or behavior, which is expected from them. The human resource managers should share the necessary information with the employees for the development of the organization (Kavanagh and Johnson 2017). It is true that not all information can be shared, but withholding any important information may cause internal and external damage to the organization. The professionals can hold regular meetings or performance reviews and both these tactics may require enormous investment of time. The information sharing can on the other hand, take place organically. Sharing necessary and important information falls under the responsibility of the human resource professionals (Bratton and Gold 2017). For example; Starbucks Company values its employees and even shares information in order to get their valuable comments or opinions.
The employees form a major part of the organization and therefore, withholding information from them can cause severe damage to the organization. An organization’s ability to share the knowledge within the workplace is highly believed to strengthen the competitiveness. Moreover, it will help in identifying the market challenges and their way outs. The human resource managers play a mediating role in sharing information, as the management deals with the functional as well as hierarchical borders of the employees (Sheehan 2014). These practices can be utilized for facilitating the knowledge and information sharing part. The function of the human resource professionals highly contribute to the knowledge and information sharing within the organizations. According to Lam, Huang and Chan (2015), the human resource practices deals with both explicit as well as tacit knowledge and the procedures of information conversion.
Compensation Policy
- Improves employee turnover.
- Conflict resolutions.
- Employee satisfaction.
- Improves employee performances.
- Training and development.
- Helps in controlling budget.
All the practices are intended to improve employee satisfaction within the organization. The human resource managers of any company are required to provide its employees with job security, compensation and benefits and extensive training facilities. If these practices are applied effectively, the company can get benefitted on the long run. Moreover, employee satisfaction improves team morale and the level of productivity.
Conclusion
To conclude, the functions or practices of the human resource managers typically involve the benefits administration, new employee pay roll procedures and record keeping. In majority of the organizations, the human resource managers are responsible for selecting and recruiting the applicants. The report throws light on several practices of the human resource managers that typically include practices like job security, selective hiring, decentralization and self managed teams, compensation policy, extensive training and information sharing. Moreover, the professionals are required to provide the employees with a proper balance of their professional and personal life. These functions or practices ultimately create result oriented working environment as they enable greater effectiveness or efficiency within the organizational setting. In addition to this, it also increases the time employees have to work and devote to their personal endeavors.
Furthermore, human resource personnel need to hold training and development sessions among the newly hired employees, in order to give them an overview of the company. The orientation programs include job skill trainings, professional development as well as leadership trainings. These activities of the human resource professionals help in improving the job skills of the employees and make them aware of the organizational policies as well as guidelines. The human resource management developmental functions reflect the promotion of the employees, in relation to their work goals. In addition to this, the compensation as well as benefit policies are often viewed together and it presents a comprehensive view on how the employers should reward their employees. These are the specific job roles of the human resource professionals and have greater impact on the organizational workforce.
References
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Bratton, J. and Gold, J., 2017. Human resource management: theory and practice. Palgrave.
Brewster, C., 2017. The integration of human resource management and corporate strategy. In Policy and practice in European human resource management (pp. 22-35). Routledge.
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Shields, J., Brown, M., Kaine, S., Dolle-Samuel, C., North-Samardzic, A., McLean, P., Johns, R., O’Leary, P., Robinson, J. and Plimmer, G., 2015. Managing Employee Performance & Reward: Concepts, Practices, Strategies. Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, T., Doherty, A. and Mc Graw, P., 2015. Managing people in organizations: A strategic human resource management perspective. Routledge.
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